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There has been a lot of talk about the marriage between Hollywood and the new technologies. I thought I'd take the temperature of the merger - so to speak. I found Michael Rivero, the chief honcho and founder of the Animation Plantation whose company created all those ethereal Bensen and Hedges commercials with the seahorse and the unbelievable animation. If you see any television or go to the movies, you will have seen his work. Michael introduced me to Lazurus, his risen-from-the-dead computer with the 1200 pixel monitor. Michael is the man responsible for the trickey stuff in Stargate, the motion picture. If you saw the picture, you will never forget the scene where the character Ra, played by Jaye Davidson, steps into the light and his headpiece disappears like the top of a roll-top desk. I asked him about that as Michael and I talked about Hollywood and technology.
GS: How did you get involved with Stargate? You weren't in on the beginning, were you?
Michael: I went down and got involved in the production and basically tried to take care of a lot of different little issues. And then, of course, one really big issue cropped up and that was one that had been a problem all along. It had been elsewhere and came back and was dumped on my head. This refers to the very first ... well, you've seen the helmet morph scene, right? The scene as originally planned by the special effects crew contained motion control on the camera and on the actor in the helmet, itself. The helmet was shot in two stages of what is called a reveal. There is the full helmet, then there is the helmet with portions missing. The idea being that as sections of the helmet would retract, there would be something underneath it to be revealed. In order for this effect to work really well, each of the subsequent passes had to be perfectly registered with each other to make the shot work. Well, the problem was ... in a word, synchronicity.
GS: This is all done digitally? Nothing was done mechanically?
Michael: No, no. This was supposed to be done mechanically up to this point on the live action set. The actor was going to be put on a motorized turntable with the motor controlled by the computer system. The same system was moving the camera so that when we shot multiple passes, the moves would be identical in each one. The only difference in the shots, according to the production supervisor, would be the helmet the guy was wearing and one shot when he was wearing no helmet at all. That was a very good production strategy, only when the elements came back, they were completely unregistered.
GS: Was there no registration between the camera and the actor?
Michael: The camera move was locked down. Where we had the problem was the actor with the different helmets and the different stages of reveal and the helmet in the shot. It was a monumental effort to get the thing to work at all. And it really underscored the necessity for having somebody with hands on the keyboard experience in the CGI supervisor and producer positions. Well, guess what they said to me? "The set has been struck and the actor's no longer available and now it's an emergency."
GS: And you were locked in?
Michael: We were locked in and it was the promise of being able to do that shot that had gotten the company the job. Because the director was very specific on how the helmet was to unfold in the reveal. It wasn't going to be a weaving morph, it wasn't going to be a dissolving or transparent wipe. He wanted to see it literally unfold. Mechanically.
GS: Couldn't you do it with a morph?
Michael: Well, we used a morphing tool but he didn't want it to morph. It was an extraordinarily complex task to get it to work and that, and a couple of other issues, delayed the film by four months. It was a horrendous situation.
GS: What did you do? Build it a frame at a time? Or how did you actually do it?
Michael: Er, Er, well just in brief, cause this is all technical stuff. We used a tool called Elastic Reality by AVID and used their technology. It's a shape-based morphing tool which allowed me to cut and paste the sections of the image and to animate them independently.
GS: I remember there were a lot of computer generated scenes. The remote village and the scene where James Spada put his face into the Stargate.
Michael: The opening shot of Stargate was a very nice one, I thought. There were five separate elements used in that scene. We had a film student from the University of Cairo to shoot the pyramids and he did a good job. We shot the water right off the dome of the Spruce Goose in Long Beach harbor. The other elements were shot on the set in Yuma, Arizona. There's a funny story there about the palm trees. They trucked out a palm tree to the Yuma desert to have in the foreground of the scene and with all the handling and all, the palm tree died. The fronds just dropped so that the whole top of the palm tree was like a pencil point. We had to build the tree in the computer. It is a totally synthetic element. That's the way it happens sometimes.
GS: So they did shoot it that way and then create it in the machine?
Michael: It was an augmented scene. What they got was augmented in the computer to flesh out the palm tree.
GS: At what stage? Was this a picture of the palm tree that you doctored up? And then put it in with the pyramids, the sand, the water and the sun and all?
Michael: It was put in with the other elements in the opening shot. Then there was a sun disk and a lens painted in. There were twelve units....That's very common.
GS: The sun came from where?
Michael: From a paint box. Most of them were just paint box elements and composited in.
GS: As I recall, there was another shot like that. In fact, there were several. They couldn't have been real places.
Michael: Basically, when you put together a piece of film, all the elements have to be handled in the compositor with the live action elements before they can come together. Digital filming is quite similar to what you would do in a conventional film using an optical printer. The advantage is you have a much greater fidelity to the original image. You don't get build up film grain and you don't strain your glass. You also have access to techniques that are not possible in an optical printer such as focusing out of focus film. (Guffaw)...
GS: Sounds like you had some experience with that. When did you start digiting with the digitals?
Michael: Well, I am reluctant to answer that question because I am so strongly typed as a computer person that it is interfering with my career. I didn't start as a computer person, I started as a child actor. I paid for college as a professional musician. Now the reason I got into computers, ... outside of the fact that they are tremendously good fun, is because of this gentlemen (pointing to a framed line drawing and autograph of Alfred Hitchcock). When I was a film student I used to sneak out of the lot at Universal through the technicolor building. It is amazing where you can get with clipboard and a serious expression on your face. I bluffed my way past his secretary and he was in his office. I said, "Mr. Hitchcock, I'm a film student..." and for some reason, he just started talking to me and asking me questions about film and what I felt about it. We talked about film and filmmaking for three and a half hours. At the end of which he drew that silhouette that you see on the wall there. You couldn't buy an education like that. One of the things he told me that stuck with me is that he couldn't imagine going on to a movie set and directing anybody to do anything that he himself could not do and because he had been long years on the British stage he felt confident, and I believe him, that he could walk onto a set and do the lighting and make the sets and run the camera and run the sound gear and make it all work himself. So that he could always give a direction that was doable and meaningful using the language that the craftsperson understood. That was one of the defining moments of my life and I have tried to build my own career forward on that, and of course, the last great frontier of all filmmaking is the new digital technology.
GS: That's quite a story.
Michael: The second thing he taught me, and this relates to what you were saying about control on the set and everything. He said, "If I am outside filming a scene with my star and a bird flies over and drops two little white spots on the left lapel on my actor's coat, it had better be just two white spots and it had better be the left lapel or that bird will never work in Hollywood again." It was his way of saying that you plan everything in advance down to the tiniest detail because it is in those missed details that costly overages and accidents and production tragedies occur. And I agree with that wholeheartedly. Now, lately because of the digital revolution having caught so many people off guard, there is a conventional wisdom of not having to understand the technology. They say, "It's all beyond knowing anyway. I just have to know what to ask for as a conceptual artist." I don't subscribe to the idea that somebody who is very technically aware and the artistic soul cannot reside in the same human being. Beethoven had to know how to write music. There's no way around it. You can't stand in front of the orchestra telling the bassoons to play a little longer, a little bit higher, now down a little bit more. Play that back for me - da, da-da da,... no, terrible. We try again tomorrow." You can't do that. I had a CGI supervisor come up to me and say, I don't need to know how it works, I just need to know what to ask for. Each of the trade unions specifies exactly what each operator can and cannot do. They are kept from obtaining broader knowledge. There are people who didn't realize that it was coming. What Hollywood is doing today is what the space program was doing twenty years ago. There's no excuse for not knowing. Down to the bare metal. You don't have to do everything yourself, but you have to be able to talk to your people in the language they know and you have to know where the limits lie. You must work within the limits of what the computers can do. When you are talking about something this complex technologically, there is no natural talent here. There's no amount of politicising that is going to make the system work for you if you don't know how to make it work. There is no substitute for knowing this stuff cold.
Copyright Gloria Stern N Hollywood 1995
